LDC

Compilers: Overview — DMD — GDC — LDC ✎

The LDC project aims to provide a portable D programming language compiler with modern optimization and code generation capabilities. The compiler uses the official DMD frontends to support both D1 and D2, and relies on the LLVM Core libraries for code generation.

LDC is fully Open Source; the parts of the code not taken/adapted from other projects are BSD-licensed (see the LICENSE file for details).

Getting started

• Latest (binary) release
• Building LDC from source
• Building and hacking LDC on Windows using MSVC
• Installing LDC on Gentoo
• Using LDC (LDC-specific language changes — LDC inline assembly expressions)

Project status

In general, LDC should work fine on most x86/x86-64 Unix-like systems, including Linux, OS X 10.7+ and most BSD flavors. Code generation should work for other platforms supported by the LLVM MC codegen infrastructure (for example ARM), but druntime/Phobos support will most likely be lacking.

OS X version prior to 10.7 (Lion) are currently not supported by the D2 compiler, because LLVM's support for thread-local storage depends on functionality which first appeared in 10.7.

x86 Windows using MinGW

• LDC 2 from Git master compiles and builds druntime/Phobos, but requires applying patches to LLVM and the MinGW runtime to fix some bugs. See Building LDC on MinGW x86.
• Hello World-style programs work (including TLS and exception handling).
• A small number of remaining test cases still fails, but many of the harder issues (real math precision, MS C runtime-caused problems, ABI differences) have already been solved.
• Estimate for making Windows x86/MinGW a »first class« target: 1 weekend of focused work, plus a Windows CI slave.

x86-64 Windows using MSVC

• LDC/LDC2 from master branch compiles without patches.
• See Building and hacking LDC on Windows using MSVC for detailed instructions.
• LLVM 3.1 is required (3.0 does not work because of missing TLS support); LLVM 3.2/3.3 is preferred.
• druntime and Phobos compile but linker errors are still possible.
• Exception handling still needs work (see here for a first patch; the llvm-objdump part of the patch is here and was commited in LLVM 3.3)
• Contact: kai@redstar.de

ARM

• Code generation is known to work.
• Currently blocked by PR15293
• Some initial work has been done on druntime, but support is not yet complete – see issue #116.

PowerPC 64-bit

• Requires LLVM trunk because of PR14751, PR14779, PR15347 and PR15359 is required
• Only Linux because LLVM does not cleanly compile on AIX.
• Code generation is known to work.
• Issues in druntime and phobos:
  • druntime: changes in core.thread and rt.lifetime are required
  • phobos: changes in std.math are required
  • other modules seem to be fine
• roughly half of the test suite passes
• Contact: kai@redstar.de

Contributing

LDC is an entirely community-driven effort, so all contributions are warmly welcomed. The easiest way to help with development is to write high-quality bug reports for any issues you run into. For a quick guide on what a useful report should contain, please see Reporting LDC issues.

If you are interested in getting into compiler development, anecdotal evidence suggests that hacking on LDC might be a nice first step, particularly because the LLVM backend is very comfortable to work with. To get started, just browse through the issue list, find a ticket that tickles your fancy (some of them are specifically marked as "junior jobs"), and work on a fix – and of course don't hesitate to ask for advice at the mailing list or on IRC. An LDC contributor's guide is in the works.

We would also be excited to see LDC packages in more OS distributions, particular Debian and its derivatives. So, if you think you might be able to help, please just drop us a line at the development mailing list. We will actively try to make packaging as smooth as possible, but besides the fact that upstream-maintained packages are sometimes discouraged, it is hard to build good packages for a system you don't know well, so we need to rely on external contributors here.

Useful Links

• Issue tracker (GitHub)
• Source code (GitHub)
• LDC discussion forum (also available via NNTP and a mailing list interface, see the forum index)
• LDC IRC channel (#ldc on Freenode)